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CIA Bots – ‘The Instant Version Control Informants’ — an annoyance?

While most FOSS contributors will be familiar with CIA and likely to utilize it for tracking commits for their project(s) and contributors, we occasionally have concerns raised from projects who find that CIA-* joined their channel unexpectedly and not on their request, this may be because someone typoed a channel name when setting things up over at the CIA page, or because someone decided to be helpful and share the joys of CIA with a new project/channel but forgot to ask the project admins/channel owners whether this would be a-ok.. and occasionally we find ourselves getting a bunch of notices alerting us to a CIA-* bot as a potential spambot as it tries rejoin a channel from which it has been banned, or when its been misconfigured and cycle a channel which has a forward set (this tends to confuse most bots!).

While freenode encourage and welcome the use of CIA-* bots on our servers, finding it to be a great tool for the wider FOSS communities, tracking thousands of concurrent projects and contributors at any given time we also acknowledge that it may be annoying to have a uninvited CIA-* bot join your channel.

We would like to ask that those of you who find yourself having a surprise CIA-* bot visiting your channel alert a staffer to the annoyance rather than ban it from your channel as this causes the bot to repeatedly attempt to rejoin, not only causing spambot alerts for staff but also lag to the bot which again affects other projects who rely on that particular bot for alerts. If the CIA-* bot is being too loud for your liking, consider muting it (/mode #yourchan +q nick) and alerting a staffer who will ensure that the bot is parted from the channel without anymore disruption to either side.

Thank you for your co-operation on this matter and thank you for using freenode!